ABSTRACT
Having been educated as a planner in Britain and having had direct experience of practice in more than one local authority, I was nurtured in the belief that flexibility was the most important ingredient in a successful planning system. Flexibility was important in a technical sense in that planning was clearly an uncertain process, and allowance had to be made to accommodate the unforeseen. It was important, too, in helping to oil the wheels of the administrative mechanism that kept the technical process going. As students shortly after the new system of structure and local plans had been introduced, my contemporaries and I could laugh at the rigidities of the 1947 development plans. Only when I came to investigate the French planning system did I begin to see that not everyone held flexibility in quite the esteem that I did. The desire to make changes, the ranges of options available to decision-makers, all of which seemed quite natural, appeared to evoke considerable disquiet, at least in some quarters, in France.
